Joker · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch Arthur Fleck right after the subway. He has just shot three men dead, and instead of running he slips into a filthy public restroom and begins, very slowly, to dance. It isn't triumph. His arms unfold as though the killing had untied a knot he'd carried his whole life. Hildur Guðnadóttir's lone cello — recorded before a frame was shot, then handed to Phoenix to move against — leads, and meaning trails behind the body. That gap, body first and sense afterward, is the whole film compressed into one held shot.

For most of his life Arthur can only watch. He absorbs a beating in an alley, endures the social worker who isn't listening, sits in the dark replaying a talk show he'll never be invited onto. Deleuze has a name for a protagonist like this: the seer (voyant), the figure who no longer acts on what he perceives but merely registers it. Classical Hollywood ran on the sensory-motor circuit — a man sees a situation and acts to change it. Phillips withholds that circuit for an hour. Arthur perceives an unlivable Gotham and can do nothing with it, and the film makes us sit inside that helplessness; this is what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image, the point where reaction stops being adequate to the world. The long single takes, the camera shooting through doorways like surveillance, the refusal to cut away from discomfort — all of it keeps us pinned beside a man who cannot respond.

What finally moves is not action but the face. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up: a feeling caught at the surface, charged but not yet discharged. Phoenix gives us the finer thing, what Deleuze called the potisign — the icon of power, where micro-movements gather across a face toward a threshold, intensity building with nowhere to go. The dossier is precise about this: the Joker is born not in one epiphanic cut but through accumulated micro-adjustments across the running time. The hunched, averted clown becomes the spread-armed persona by degrees. You can't point to the frame where it happens. The pathological laughter is the same logic made audible — an affect that erupts as pure quality, untethered from any situation that would explain it.

Then there is the dance, which keeps returning — on the stairs, in the bathroom, in the bloodied bathroom mirror. Deleuze's late cinema of the body reads gesture as the gest: a posture that exposes a social or theatrical relation rather than advancing a plot. Arthur's choreography is exactly that. It is a body discovering it can occupy space, performing a self before that self exists. The famous Bronx-staircase ascent — shot in full anamorphic width, the single most composed image in the film — is a gest in motion: the spatial liberation Sher built into the whole arc, frames opening as Arthur stops shrinking.

But the deepest Deleuzian stake is the lie. The romance with Sophie, the tender visit, the warm hand on the shoulder at the comedy club — the film holds these at the same level as everything real, then retroactively dissolves them. Deleuze called this the powers of the false, and its mechanics here are textbook. Classical cinema rested on a quiet contract: the image is a truthful witness, what you see happened. Joker breaks it. The fantasy sequences are a falsifying narration — versions presented as co-true until they can't both stand — and the Sophie thread is crystalline description in its purest form: an image that composes its own object and then replaces it, so that when Arthur enters her apartment a second time we watch the scene we already "saw" be peeled away. This is why the film demands a rewatch. It isn't a twist you solve once; it's a structure where present and delusion stop being separable. Critics call this kind of construction a mind-game film, and the label fits — the unreliability is editorial, built into the cut rather than confessed by a voice.

The lineage is worn openly, almost as argument. The chiaroscuro 35mm and available-light New York come straight from Taxi Driver; the solo-cello score rhymes with Herrmann's solo saxophone; the subjective frame around a violence the film refuses to adjudicate is lifted nearly verbatim. The King of Comedy is cast into the film — De Niro, once the failed comedian stalking a host, is now the host, and we're required to read Arthur against Rupert Pupkin. Network and Dog Day Afternoon hand over the breakdown-as-broadcast climax and the New York male whose crime becomes spectacle. Phillips isn't quoting for flattery; he's claiming a chapter in that discourse and saying the powers of the false were always latent in it.

The significance is blunt. A hard-R, nearly actionless character study took a billion dollars and the Golden Lion at Venice — the first comic-book film to win it. It proved the seer and the unreliable image could carry a mass audience, that you could build a tentpole out of withheld action and a falsifying structure. Whether that's a triumph or a warning is the question the film leaves open, which is the most honest thing about it. Watch the bathroom dance again. You already know how it ends, and you still can't tell what's true.